Million Dollar Baby

Matisse Has Arrived. How About San Antonio?

In 1996, a D Magazine feature on the Dallas Museum of Art’s turbulent history worried that the then-recently expanded DMA was “doomed to opulent mediocrity,” a condition marked by such symptoms as too grand a building for too minor a collection and too few major exhibitions.

These days, San Antonio art fanciers might similarly lament that their city, for all its growth, doesn’t often land the kind of big-ticket exhibitions that regularly stop, and sometimes originate from, Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth, let alone Chicago, Philadelphia or Los Angeles. “Houston’s Fine Arts Museum”—the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, that is—had Picasso last year and Braque this year, plus John Singer Sargent Watercolors and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s Age of Impressionism show. That exhibition had previously stopped at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum, which has become the go-to spot for collection highlights from the Art Institute of Chicago, having hosted both an Impressionist crowd pleaser and a modernist one. As for the DMA, it’s in the middle of its first major Islamic art exhibition and in recent memory has hosted a surprising Edward Hopper drawing survey, an equally revelatory Jean Paul Gaultier retrospective, and The Mourners: Medieval Masterworks from the Court of Burgundy. It’s only natural that San Antonio art lovers might look at their counterparts in other cities and ask, “Why not us?”

Small wonder Mayor Julian Castro, just days before President Barack Obama tapped him to be the next secretary of housing and urban development, was on hand for the San Antonio Museum of Art’s recent press conference heralding the upcoming Matisse: Life in Color, Masterworks from The Baltimore Museum of Art. It’s nice to be able to drop a name like Matisse when touting your city as “a city on the rise, a city creating a vision, a brainpower city,” as Castro reportedly billed San Antonio at the event—and probably at every event at which he speaks.

The lion’s share of the nearly 100 Matisse paintings, drawings and works on paper in Life in Color come from the renowned Cone Collection—the one that topped Biederman’s list of exhibitions Dallas wasn’t getting in the mid-1990s. It was formed during the first half of the 20th century by Baltimore sisters Claribell and Etta Cone, who acquired some 500 Matisses spanning six decades of his career while assembling a 3,000-object collection that included works by Picasso, Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh, as well as a variety of textiles, jewelry, furniture, and African, Asian, and Near Eastern art. Considered the Baltimore Museum of Art’s crown jewel, the Cone Collection’s Matisse holdings may be the best anywhere.

Luber’s friendship with BMA director Doreen Bolger helped land the traveling show, which has previously stopped in Indianapolis and Minneapolis to raise money for the BMA, which is undergoing renovations (although not in the galleries that usually house the Matisses. They’ve been showing German Expressionism while the Matisses are on the road, prompting criticism from art journalist Tyler Green that the BMA is shortchanging locals while monetizing its most prized works). Before Luber took the SAMA job, she was living in Baltimore, where she sat on the BMA’s collections committee and did some consulting for the museum about its European collections. “I’m so grateful that (Bolger) thought of me,” Luber says.

“It’s an expensive show for us,” Luber says of Life in Color, adding that she “had to read through an incredibly long list of funders” at the event with Castro. “Our budget is more than $1 million on this show, so it’s not something that we took on lightly, either. It’s a real investment in of the level of artistic accomplishment that we can bring to the people.”

The people who can afford a $25 ticket, that is. I think the Matisse show may turn out to be an important milestone for San Antonio’s art community, and I’m not going to knock SAMA for raising money at the gate when its annual budget, at about $6 million, is a fraction of that of its counterparts in Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston. I just hope this long list of Matisse funders sticks around to support not just the kind of programming that says San Antonio has arrived, but the kind of policies, like free admission, that say SAMA is here for all San Antonians.